


I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead

by Xarybde



Series: So that each March I may gleam into leaf [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Child Death, Child Neglect, Dissociation, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mishandling of Corpses, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Uchiha Massacre, Uchiha Sasuke Has Issues, Uchiha Sasuke-centric, no seriously mind the tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27048988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xarybde/pseuds/Xarybde
Summary: Dying is easy. Sasuke knows this better than anyone else.
Relationships: Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Sasuke & Uchiha Shisui
Series: So that each March I may gleam into leaf [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974202
Comments: 28
Kudos: 195





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [In Good Company](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084115) by [weialala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weialala/pseuds/weialala). 
  * Inspired by [Ragnarǫkr](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9707828) by [weialala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weialala/pseuds/weialala). 



> Hey, so. I did a thing. I have diagnosed PTSD and my life is currently falling apart, so this is loosely drawing on some of my own feelings. Catharsis, and all that jazz. Please mind the warnings, people. This is probably the first installment of a series following Sasuke with a rather liberal approach to canon, because I empathize way too much with this boy and he deserved better. It won't stay that way, but it does start off rather dark. Please be careful if you think it might be a problem for you. 
> 
> Also, English isn't my first language, so there's probably some grammatical errors in there. I did my best to weed them out, but to be completely honest I'm feeling rather heartbroken and sick of looking at this thing, so this is what you get for now; I'll be back later to edit it some more. Credits to weialala for a lot of the worldbuilding and the drive to write this thing in the first place; her writing has been very dear to me for many years and I hope she doesn't mind the inspiration.

Later, Sasuke will say, _My brother spared me_ , but he'll be lying. Itachi killed him just as dead as everyone else.

Tsukiyomi is all sharp, painful lines where the moon is a bloated red thing in the night’s sky and his brother’s face is smooth, cruel marble. The shadows writhe and cast the shape of a monster on the tatami floor. Sasuke breathes in, and the world is alight with pain. He breathes out, and all has gone dead.

Here is how it goes: Your brother brings his sword down, and you fall. There is a hole right below your clavicle, and you can’t be sure but you think it’s where your heart should be. Blood blooms bright and obscene as your lungs fill with water. You are drowning, and across the room lies your mother’s body, eyes wide and dark on her greying face. As you watch, a fly lands lazily into the white of her eyes. You cannot move.

Above you, the clock ticks on.

Sasuke dies in three minutes and his brother kills him again, sword striking down, down, down, until he knows each one of the those one hundred and eighty seconds by heart. And still, it goes on.

One can die a great many times in three days, Sasuke finds out.

Sasuke thinks he is dead, and this is purgatory. Tsukiyomi is flawless. He dies under a falling sword and he watch a fly land in the white of his mother’s eye, wide and dark and barely glazed over. His lungs rattle out his last breaths and the world dissolves into primary colors, the stark red of blood against the yellow glow of the lamp and the blue lines of the night’s sky.

And then he’s up again, looking up at a man wielding a sword and he’s down, the fly, the world dissolving into paint-splattered smoke and then up again, into greys and black and red, red, red.

Tsukiyomi is flawless and every single one of the details of the scene are carved into the back of Sasuke’s eyelids with loving precision. All of them, except for one.

Sasuke looks up and his brother’s face is cast in shadows; his mouth doers not move as he speaks, spitting out, _Weak_ , like it’s a curse.

(Tsukiyomi is flawless and that is what will undo it, many years later.)

Sasuke dies and keeps on dying, taking a breath and down again, and he thinks, _This is hell_.

He thinks that right up until he dies and wakes up and dies and wakes up and does not die again. He is down on his back and there is blood all down his front, but it’s not his. His eyes are open and a fly lands into the white of his mother’s eye, wide and glassy and lifeless.

The clock ticks the three minutes mark, and he does not die. Somehow, this is worse.

He drags himself up, eventually. His limbs feel long and jerky, like they’re being pulled on by a very inept pupeteer. He crawls to his mother’s side. He reaches out, knowing it’s silly, and puts a hand on the side of her neck. Her skin is cold and soft in a terrible, lifeless way, and he flinches. The only pulse he hears is his own.

Sasuke kneels there for a long, long time, staring blankly at the wall, mind stalling. Itachi needn’t have bothered with Tsukiyomi, he thinks, not when reality is so much worse. Tsukiyomi hadn’t captured the way Mother’s eyes went milky in death, not when it was stuck in the same three-minutes loop. Tsukyomi hadn’t shown him the dark brown of his father’s blood and the way the left side of his face caved in.

Sasuke, distantly, wishes he could run into one of his uncle or aunt’s arms and cry, share the terrible weight of his mother’s eyes and his father’s blood with someone else. But he knows he can’t, because he found the trail of bodies Itachi left in his wake. There is no one else.

He gets up, because there is no one else and he might not be a very good one, but he’s still an Uchiha and he knows duty right down to his bones. The rites, he thinks. He has to take care of the rites.

A month ago, they fished Shisui’s body out of the river, and Sasuke learned what death was. It looked like his favorite cousin, his face pale and bloated, hair stuck to his face with the dripping river water, two hollows pits where his eyes should be. It sounded like the wail his mother let out upon seeing the body, and the fury in the hushed whispers between his uncles. It had smelled like rot and water, and then like ash, when they burned the body on a pyre with the flames a striking blue.

He knows better, now. Death stinks of fear and piss and copper. It means getting up, and counting the bodies, all of them, Uncle Kyogoku with his arm torn away, Izumi slumped over with a great bloody gash across her throat like a second smile, Grandfather lying in bed with his spidery fingers curled around a sword he did not have. Aunt Natsume, still half-sitting on her sofa, arms curled around herself, as if to shield her bloated belly.

Sasuke – Sasuke can be brave, he _can_ , he has to. He touched his mother’s dead face and and brushed back his cousin’s hair over her terribly ravaged face, and he carried on, because there is no one else. But now, now he finds himself looking upon his aunt’s pregnant form, and he – cannot do this.

He vomits in his aunt’s flowerbeds. He clutches the ceramic pot like a lifeline, retching and heaving, unable to think past the disfigured figure with the baby in her stomach, oh gods, the _baby_ –

He comes back in. He has no choice. There is no one else. The scene is still as horrifying the second time as it is the first, but Sasuke’s getting better, now, at shutting out the world around him. Auntie has a kunai inbedded deep beneath her breastbone. She is not breathing.

Her stomach is cool to the touch.

She had been eight or so months along. Sasuke knows, because he had been endlessly fascinated by it, trailing behind her at every opportunity, wide-eyed with wonder. He had been the youngest of the Uchiha Clan; the thought of a baby, with chubby cheeks and clumsy fingers, had him bursting with questions Aunt Natsume had endured with good-natured cheer. She was always kind.

Now, Sasuke is doing his best to right her up, because it seems almost cruel, the way she lay strewn there like a discarded doll. Her stomach is very large. The baby had been close. It was a boy. He was to be named Tajima, in honor of one of their ancestors. Now –

Then, Sasuke stills, because. Because the baby was so close to being born, they were waiting on him any day now, and what were – what were the chances he was still alive in there? Still alive, inside his dead mother?

Sasuke, knows, distantly, that he’s shaking. This is what death means, he thinks as he passes by Auntie’s husband on the kitchen floor, it means grabbing a knife from the kitchen rack and kneeling beside your dead aunt and pressing the tip of the blade to the swollen skin of her stomach, thinking, _maybe, maybe_. This is what family is: cutting a woman open like a pig to the slaughter, because he can’t bear the thought of leaving her baby here to die, can’t fanthom the horror of it.

This is duty: sinking his entire arm inside his aunt’s womb, tearing her placenta open and cradling the soft skull of her unborn babe in his shaking hands. He is dead, of course he is; but Sasuke has a duty and he knows duty right down to his bones, so he lays the cool, blue-faced child back down on his mother’s chest, and does not scream.

Sasuke is an Uchiha and he knows his rites, but there are twenty-six bodies to burn, twenty-six adult bodies he can barely move on his own. There is a ceremony to it, or at least there should be, but Sasuke is a child and alone and so he builds the pyre out of torn curtains and bedsheets and poured oil, and he brings the bodies over in a wheelbarrow and drags them onto the pile like rigid, discarded dolls, and when he breathes out the flames that lick out of his mouth are a damning red.

(This is Clan: being seven and covered in soot and blood, putting one's kin to rest in the worst way possible, throat cloaked with long-familiar shame.)


	2. Chapter 2

The Uchiha Clan did not do anything quietly, grieving included. They cremated their dead over roaring blue fires and screamed their anguish to the heavens until their vocal chords gave out.

Sasuke is silent.

He sits in the Hokage’s office with his feet dangling a few centimeters from the floor. Somebody did a decent enough job of clearing the blood off him, but when he turns his hands palms-up there is a line of brown-red smudged under his fingernails.

Weak, his brother called him, and that’s what Sasuke feels, in that moment. Not fragile, per se, like glass that would shatter at any touch. He feels like clay, like mud, like anything could happen to him and he would yield to the pressure. Someone could throw him out the window and he wouldn’t fight. Wouldn’t care.

His ears aren’t working. He knows they are fine, because a medic-nin looked him over, but he can’t hear anything the Sandaime is saying. He watches his mouth shape the words _We are all so terribly sorry for your loss_ , and feels…

Nothing.

The Compound gets razed over overnight. It was big, even for the twenty-six clan members that lived there; for a lone little boy, it’s an unacceptable waste of space in a city as strained for space as Konohagakure. The decision is not Sasuke’s to make, because he is not of age. Instead, he is made to sit through a meeting with a greying man who talks to him about upkeep and taxes. Sasuke stares at the mole on the man’s left eyelid instead, drifting through the hour like dust motes.

He is given a standard-issue apartment for orphans, albeit on the nicer side of town. He sits on his couch with the TV on so he can pretend to watch, and only waits before it is dark outside to go to bed. He does not sleep, but he likes the illusion of normalcy, walking his body through the motions of life.

The next morning, he chokes down some crackers for breakfast – he is not hungry, but food is something that people need, and so he shall eat – and finds his way down the artisan’s district. He can’t tell if he meandered his way there or marched straight down; time is a foreign beast, constricting and expanding at random.

Sasuke has a paper in his pocket, where he’d written down all of his kinsmen’s names, their full given names, in his most impeccable kanji. It’s still not very good. His hands feel clumsy and big, like they belong to someone else. Hiring someone to carve the name on his family shrine is a trial – both because the world seems to keep on spinning by too fast for him to understand, and because he still hasn’t managed any words.

Luckily, the town gossip had done its deed, and just about everybody seems aware of him as soon as he walks into a shop. The sculptor he settles on – a middle-aged man, big and brown in the way people got when they spent a lot of time outdoors – takes his scrap of paper with gentle, reverent hands, and swears he will endeavor to do his family justice.

Sasuke just nods, feeling incredibly, impossibly old, and leads the way to the shrine on the bank of the Naka river that his family has kept for generations. The man is quick in getting to work, washing his hands and feet before entering the shrine. Sasuke doesn’t go in. He sits on the steps and watches as, across the river, the house he grew up in is torn down.

The sun is setting by the time the man is done carving the names. In the leftover dust that settled on his face, his tear tracks stand starkly visible. Sasuke has no words for him, only money, and even that he refuses. Sasuke thinks perhaps he should feel irritated at the blatant display of pity, or perhaps grateful for his thoughtfulness. But he just feels hollowed out and aching instead, so he nods the man goodbye and doesn’t offer to accompany him back.

Across the river, piles of rubbles are forming. Sasuke thinks he ought to feel something about that, too. And maybe he does, somehow, somewhere; maybe he is furious and relieved and everything in between, but none of it registers. He only thinks: Soon, it’ll only be me and the shrine left.

Maybe, soon, people will start forgetting there was an Uchiha Clan at all. That’s not likely, though. Their name will live on in the history books: behold, the clan that killed itself from within. They’ll remember their madness, their power, their Sharingan. But no one will remember his mother’s dimpled smiles, or the way Shisui’s hair curled when it rained, or the way Izumi smiled slow and wicked when she taught him about all the different sorts of blades. The way Misao was vain about his hair, or how Tensei would collect the sappiest romance novels known to man and hide them like a dirty little scret. The cool touch of Grandmother’s fingers on his forehead, saying, _let me see you, child_ , as she mapped out his features with fingertips that still bore calluses.

The way Uncle Kyoguku would let Sasuke sit over his knee and press an ear to his chest to listen to the rumble of his voices as he told the stories of ages past. The way Itachi would say _Watch, Sasuke_ , sneaking him off to the redwoods to throw kunai at the tree bark.

Sasuke remembers all of this with the crystal-clear clarity that comes from being an Uchiha; he doubts he will ever forget the exact way the scar curved around his grandfather’s nose or the number of eyelashes framing Aunt Natsume’s round, kind eyes. But he’s the only one; and soon he will be gone too. He will sit there on the cold stone steps until his body sinks into the ground like mud, or clay, and he can finally – _finally_ – rest.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick warning: mind the updated tags.

Time, as it is wont to do, goes on.

Sasuke is informed he does not have to go back to the Academy until the next week, which is an unexpected mercy but one all the same. For the person he was two days – five days ago – this would have been outrageous, so eager was he to prove himself, to honor his Clan. To be like Itachi. Anything, to be more like Itachi.

Now, Sasuke will never try to be like Itachi ever again, because he understands he never could be. When Itachi was his age, he was a shinobi of Konoha, perhaps even already in ANBU. He wouldn’t have been caught dead with his legs dangling from his seat in the Hokage’s office. He could have been half-dead, covered in his kin’s blood, and he would have been standing with his chin held high, as is proper. Itachi would have survived. Sasuke was spared.

Sasuke is the boy with blood under his fingernails who dug a fire pit to burn his kin, who cut his aunt open with a kitchen knife and held the soft skull of her unborn babe between his hands. He’s the boy who died, and died, and died some more. There is an ache in his chest, a hollow feeling under his breastbone. Sometimes, he presses a hand against his chest and thinks he ought to have a scar there, in the place Itachi stabbed him and stabbed him, but there is nothing. Only soft, unmarred baby skin, and he suddenly, desperately, wants to scratch at it until it bleeds, to keep scratching until he hits muscle and bone and the weak, fluttering heart underneath.

He spends the week haunting his apartment like a ghost. The first day, he does not even bother changing out of his pajamas. On the second, he goes grocery shopping. It’s only when he’s inside, under the artificially cool air of a convenience store, that he realizes he has no idea what to buy. He’s never had to do the cooking before.

He settles on eggs.

On the third day, he attempts an omelet and gives up halfway through, eating the strangely pasty result directly from the pan until only charred bits of eggs remain, seemingly forever stuck to the bottom of the pan.

On the fourth day, he sleeps, and dreams of Tsukiyomi. He spends half an hour with his forehead pressed against the toilet, heaving and retching and pretending he’s not crying.

On the fifth day, he doesn’t get up at all.

The sixth day is a Monday. Sasuke lies on his back in his bed until he sees the sun peeking over the horizon. There is a choice there, he knows, between hiding and fighting. Between staying here, where it isn’t quite – safe (he will never be safe again, not from his brother, not from reality, both whom live on in his nightmares), but where he can at least pretend he doesn’t exist.

And outside, where it is loud and crowded and people point and stare like he’s something alien, something that pointedly does not belong. Where people know the whole gnarly truth of it, even as he himself cannot bring himself to face it.

Sasuke gets up.

He is an Uchiha, he tells himself, and madness might be in his blood but cowardice isn’t. He is an Uchiha, the very last, and so it falls to him to uphold his clan’s duty to his village. he burned his kin. He can get dressed and go to school.

Except, as it turns out, he really, really can’t.

It was a thing, to be stared out in the street. It felt like ants crawling over his skin, like the silky-soft whisper of Itachi saying _you’re weak, so weak_ , every one of his insecurities come to life. But he had always been going to or from somewhere then; there was always an escape to be found. The Academy has no such thing.

The Academy means sitting out in the open, with small children gaping at him from behind their hands, speaking in barely hushed whispers. It feels like he’s a particularly interesting beetle, stuck to his desk as if under a looking glass.

The adults are almost worse. Children are unashamedly curious and that makes them cruel, sometimes, but Sasuke can handle cruelty, has handled much worse than that at the hands of his own kin. But somehow, it’s the pity in Iruka-sensei’s eyes that makes him flinch.

That’s the difference, really: other children say _The Uchiha Clan was massacred_ like it’s market gossip, because, for them, it is. They have no ballpark against which to measure the magnitude of that loss. Sasuke somehow manages not to be too envious about it.

But the teachers – they look at him like they _know_ , and that makes Sasuke want to scream. There’s a part of him that so desperately wants to hold his grief close to his chest, like it’s a toy he doesn’t want to share. He doesn’t want strangers to look at him and know the very depths his family has sunk to. He wants to curl himself around this thing he still cannot bear to name, drape himself around it like a cloak of armor, and shield it from the world.

But there is no steel in Sasuke. Only soft, fleshy parts that yield against the pull of a sword, that will slowly erode away under the rain. Sasuke couldn’t protect himself and can’t protect his family’s memory, now, either, and he can’t even tell which one stings the most.

Weak, Itachi called him, and Sasuke had always known it to be true, but it’s another thing, to bear witness to it.

The dray drags on sluggishly. Sasuke makes himself go through the motions of taking notes, even though the paper blurs in and out of focus, like a bad photograph. During breaks, he locks himself into a bathroom stall and counts the seconds until he has to go back to class. He’s gotten very good at that, counting. One-hundred and eighty seconds is three minutes and three minutes is how long it takes for him to die. He dies five times each break.

Lunch rolls around at some point, and Sasuke pulls out his bento in the remotest corner of the classroom. He’s not hungry, rather feels like puking actually, but he knows not at least pretending to eat lunch like the others will only attract more attention. His lunch is store-bought, because if Sasuke still hasn’t figured the eggs out, then rice is probably out of the question.

He’s pulling apart his chopsticks with meticulous precision – because he doesn’t want splinters, really, not at all because he wants to stall eating for as long as possible – when a loud voice jars him back to reality with an unpleasant lurch:

“What’s wrong with you anyway, teme? You sick or something?”

Sasuke’s mouth falls open in stunned outrage as he looks up at none other than Uzumaki Naruto, in all his aggressively orange glory. The boy obviously didn’t get the memo, because for all that he’s loud and obnoxious he was never _mean_ , but.

It hadn’t even occurred to Sasuke, until then, that he would have to say the words aloud. To say: _My brother killed my clan_ , and know this to be the terrible, inescapable truth. He had taken for granted that everyone would know, had hated that they had, and now that he’s confronted with the other option, he flounders.

Foolish, foolish boy.

But his momentary silence is enough for a shocked gasp to cut through the classroom, and then Ino, the Yamanaka girl, is there, yanking Naruto up by the ear and shouting, face purpling with rage. The boy is protesting, still not understanding, and Sasuke – he can’t do this. He can’t stay there and watch understanding dawn on his face, watch pity bloom across his face. He can’t, he can’t, _he can’t_.

When he comes back to, it is quiet and dark. He is curled on his side under a massive tree root, with dirt in his mouth and his nails scabbed raw. He is aching and tired, so tired he thinks he might weep. Mercifully, he doesn’t.

Outside his makeshift refuge, the sun is setting. Shame is creeping up his throat like a vine. He ran away. Naruto didn’t know, and Sasuke ran away. Like a coward. Like a fool.

When he was younger, Sasuke had wanted to bring pride to his family. When he’d realized that he would never manage this much, he thought he could at least be quietly mediocre. He always thought – hoped – that he at least wouldn’t bring shame to their name, that what he lacked in talent he would make up for in hard work.

And yet, here he is.

Sasuke’s head aches and his hands ache and his heart aches. The world is towering and foreign and he is alone in the world, skipping school whilst his parents’ murderer runs free. (Not his brother, never his brother again.)

He gets up. At his hip, his kunai pouch weighs heavy and foreboding. There is a choice here, he thinks, again, except it’s not really a choice at all, is it? He could lay back down and drive a kunai through his chest, and it would all be over, except not, because the gods would strike his soul down for dying the coward’s death, and he would spend an eternity without being able to stand before his family and apologize.

When he was four, Sasuke nicked his palm open on one of his brother’s kunai. Even now, he remembers the dressing down that got him from Mother, but before that, there was the weight of a perfectly balanced weapon in his hand, its edge sharpened to nearly-invisible points. _You know your weapon is sharp enough_ , Brother had said, _when you don’t even feel the cut_.

Sasuke was never a very good Uchiha. He was silly and cheerful, even in the face of their father’s temper. He never had Shisui’s raw talent or Itachi’s unending drive; back then, he would much rather spend his days out in the woods, building small houses out of fallen twigs and collecting the shiniest pebbles on the riverbank. His father beat the worst out of him eventually, throwing out his pebbles into the trash and making him watch as his little houses burned merrily away. Sasuke wasn’t a very good Uchiha, but his father would make one out of him the only way he knew how, and so he watched as Sasuke struggled through the Grand Fireball Jutsu for weeks on end, until one day he refused to let him go to bed until he got it right. And Sasuke did make one, eventually, in the dead of the night as the rest of the clan was sound asleep. It was small and lopsided and it burned on the way out, but he did it.

If he couldn’t swallow properly for weeks after that because of his burned throat, nor turn the door handles because the skin of his hands had melted off, well – it was an acceptable sacrifice.

Sasuke takes a kunai out of his pouch, turning it over in thought. Moonlight reflects off its edge for a moment, until he rights his grip. Weapons – weapons make sense. They’re carefully crafted, curated, balanced in order to operate at peak efficiency. They have a purpose, even if it is a hollow one. Sasuke thinks part of him died that night with the rest of his kin, and what remains is a shell his brother left behind, like an animal drained of blood. There is something broken in him, that will never be mended, but while he might never be a real person again, he can be this. He can hone his edges until he drops from exhaustion, spit fire like a forge until his lips crack and bleed.

He will never make his family proud, will never get the chance, now, but he can put their souls to rest. He can even give his brother a good fight, a good death, even if he doesn’t deserve it, because Sasuke is weak and his hatred is a small, fluttering thing in his breast, a fire that won’t quite take hold. He will never be good, never be great; he will never bring them honor, and while part of him mourns this, a greater part thinks of dragging his kin’s bodies through the mud, setting them alight with a tremble, and knows:

He has done this before. He can do this again.

(He holds himself the way he has seen Itachi do a thousand time before, still and ready in a way he could never have managed before, adjusting his feet, knees, hips and shoulders until they align with what he sees in his mind’s eye, brings the kunai up until it winks against the light. There is a heaviness in his stomach and a lightness in his feet and he feels like smoke, like he is falling apart and pulling himself back together.

He breathes in the scent of blood and mud and clay, and takes aim.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo, that's a wrap. I have a lot of ideas for this going forward, but I feel it would fit better in a new installment, so it's going to be a series. Thank you to anyone who has reached the end of this mess of a story, I hope you all are doing okay.


End file.
